VoIP, UC markets showing growth

VoIP, UC markets showing growth

Things appear to be looking up for the voice-over-IP and unified communications markets. In its 2014 “VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers” report, Infonetics Research estimated that the global markets for VoIP and UC solutions would reach $88 billion by 2018, an increase of $20 billion from last year.

The dramatic rise in investments in SIP trunking in particular has helped to grow the market in North America. The study also revealed that VoIP subscribers grew 8 percent year-over-year to 212 million in 2014.

“Businesses investing in UC services rose 13 percent last year.”

Another trend that helped to increase the size of the market was the growing interest in UC services. The report discovered a 13 percent increase in the number of businesses investing in such services last year and seats rose 35 percent due to greater demand for cloud support.

“Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream, strengthened by the growing adoption of SIP trunking and cloud services worldwide,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, unified communications and IMS at Infonetics Research. “Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest up market as mid-market and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market.”

In a statement about the study, Myers noted that the plateau in growth was to be expected as the market continues to diversify.A separate Infonetics study focusing on the service provider VoIP market also revealed positive news for the industry, though growth was slower in that segment than in others. According to the report, the service provider market increased by 5 percent in the third quarter of 2014 from the same time last year, reaching $1 billion.

“We expected growth in the service provider VoIP and IMS equipment market to slow this year as large operators such as AT&T, Verizon and NTT DoCoMo commercially launch voice over LTE and utilize capacity on IMS networks,” said Myers. “Following a tremendous 2013, revenue growth has tapered in 2014, though is still positive, with the market up five percent in the third quarter from a year ago; VoLTE deployments will remain the most important driver, though wireline is still making strong contributions.”